We live in an age of aggressive, vacuous self-promotion, for which reality television - including shows ostensibly dedicated to business, like The Apprentice and Dragons' Den - must bear some responsibility. But is it too much to ask of the wealth creators that they keep it real? There appears to be a pernicious cult emerging, especially within the technology industry, of "famous for being famous" entrepreneurs, who swank around with D-list celebrities at awards ceremonies when they ought to be in the office, building their businesses and creating jobs.There are, I think, three main types of celebrity entrepreneur. The first is the media darling, who may or may not have had tangible successes. The media darling courts publicity, leaping to accept invitations to spew banalities on BBC News 24, either to plug their doomed venture or to relive their glory days on Dragons' Den.
Like the television shows they and their role models spring from, the media darlings offer a self-help, soundbite-friendly vision of business that bears little relation to the realities of running a successful company - perhaps because most of them have forgotten what that feels like, if they ever knew. Few of the entrepreneurs most aggressively pursuing a media profile have any significant achievements. Most are young-ish, and fairly attractive.
The technology industry offers particularly instructive examples of this type, perhaps because entrepreneurs working in tech are ready-primed to exploit the name-dropping, product flogging and endless self-congratulation which saturate Twitter and the other social networks (I have a theory that Sky News producers aren't allowed to source guests from anywhere else). Many of the darlings even run social businesses themselves.
The second type is the back room networker: probably in their forties or early fifties, with an impressive address book but almost no track record. The back roomers often run firms with "capital" in the name but put little skin in the game, spending their time insinuating themselves onto governmental advisory committees and showing up at parties. They're usually found at the centre of the room in a red silk blouse and attention-seeking jewellery, name-dropping furiously.
And then there are those who ought to know better. People with impressive and real experience in business, but who exhibit characteristics of both types, perhaps because they feel pressure to live up to the demands of being a celebrity entrepreneur. Step forward Sháá Wasmund, a successful serial businesswoman who founded her most recent venture, the business support and advice network Smarta, in 2009.
Wasmund has a website that would make Gillian McKeith blush. Casting your eye over pages saturated with cloying testimony from other high-profile wheeler-dealers and snazzy pictures of Wasmund sketching inane platitudes in the air, it's difficult not to laugh at the sheer self-importance of it all. "Sháá is a force of nature," we're told, "A living model of relationship-building and rapport-building genius."
And yet, there are traces of insecurity lurking behind the airbrushed portraiture. Signs that even Wasmund doesn't really buy it.
Evidently unhappy with her social media footprint, Wasmund has purchased Facebook ads to drive traffic to her own Facebook page. According to Facebook, purchasing ads for your own page doesn't violate their terms of service, but it seems oddly self-defeating to me that someone would seek to open up a rift between their real-world achievements and their online profile. Why would a successful, well-respected entrepreneur feel the need to inflate her online presence by effectively paying for fans?
"The only reason I can think of to purchase ads for your own page would be to swell the number of fans who follow your updates and messages, perhaps with a view to eventually selling them something, but more likely just to raise your profile, or give an exaggerated impression of your importance," explains a London-based social media consultant. "But this one's a bit daft, if you ask me.
"If you buy ads for your own page, everyone's going to know you've done it. And because of the way Facebook works, if you get a few people in a particular business signing up, their friends, who probably work in similar jobs, will see it too. So you're setting yourself up for a bit of a ribbing. It feels like a bit of a half-hearted way to raise your profile. I wonder if the reputational damage isn't worse than only having a handful of contacts who actually know who you are."
Wasmund describes herself as a "self-confessed social media evangelist", so it's reasonable to assume that she knows what she's doing. Perhaps she thinks shelling out to pimp one's own Facebook page is social media best practice. (Since she declined to answer any questions on the subject, I guess we'll never know.) Two things are certain: one, it doesn't look good, and two, a woman with her track record really doesn't need to be doing this.
Wasmund, it must be said, isn't the only one getting carried away with the temptations of social media: dig a little deeper on the internet and you discover a whole network of back-slappers propping each other up. Maybe it's just social media making something that has always happened more visible? Nevertheless, in a world where transparency and honesty are held as cardinal virtues, the audacity of people who use sly tactics to apparently misrepresent their online influence can be staggering.
It's not like big egos are new to business. But a combination of television shows that glamourise entrepreneurs, often distorting the gritty and occasionally unpleasant reality of starting your own business, the explosion of social media and a proliferation of young tech companies all seem to be breeding fame-hungry, social media-powered self-promoters for whom the cult of personality is pre-eminent, and to whom "cash flow" and "exit" represent little more than buzzwords to be rattled out in interviews. Meanwhile, as people who ought to know better get sucked into the self-regarding maelstrom, a fabulous opportunity to educate the next generation of tycoons in the realities of business is evaporating, displaced by the hot air of the speaker circuit.
I can't help but wonder how much damage the celebrity entrepreneurs are doing to bright young people with big ideas, who are being persuaded that self-promotion is the best way to build the next Google or Apple. Because I have a message for budding tycoons: it isn't.
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